The Me in the Mirror

CW: Gore, murder

And there I stood, looking at my reflection. As far as I could tell, the brown eyes staring back at me belonged to an entirely different man. Both of us were breathing heavily. I was shocked at what my hands had done, but the me in the mirror seemed calm. He had done this before. He knew what to do. Maybe I could avoid anymore conflict if I listened to him. As if hearing my thoughts, he grinned. It was the grin of an evil genius. He was a madman and I knew it, and I was sure he knew I knew it. 

“Just say it,” he said to me in a smooth, calm voice. “You know you need my help, and you know I am the only one who can help you now.”

I did not want to let him out again, but I knew he was right. “What you did was wrong,” I said as I looked down at my hands. They were red with blood. 

“You were the one who asked me to help you,” he said. “Don’t you remember?”

I did remember. I remembered every detail. It had been almost like a nightmare. It had been dark outside and I had only just gotten home from work. Not long after I had taken my shoes off, my wife had decided to start an argument. We had argued for a few minutes before I saw him looking back at me from a spoon. Please take care of this, I thought. I was pushed back into a different part of my mind. It was a part where I could only observe. I could not wiggle my toes or run my hands through my brown hair. I was only able to watch what the me in the mirror did next. 

“I only saw what you did,” I said, interrupting the memory, “but I don’t know why you did it. You didn’t have to kill her.”

“Let me continue the story from my point of view so you can know why,” he said. “You had given me control and it was lovely. How I loved to be able to move the body I shared with you, weaker version of myself. You had finally let me loose, yet you had been trying to keep me out for so long. How selfish of him, I had thought to myself. I then heard that woman yell at me and then I was reminded of what I was there to do. I licked my lips. I was bloodthirsty and I knew it.

I moved my hand to her throat. Oh, the fear in her eyes was truly a delicious sight. I so badly wanted to do it there, but it would be easier to clean up the mess in the bathroom. So I dragged her in there, but not before I picked up the spoon that the weaker me had seen me in. Though I am rather clever, thinking that confuses even me. The average person would probably not be able to understand at all. How stupid everyone else is!

I shoved the woman in the tub. How she struggled to get out of my grasp, but my strength exceeded hers by tenfold. I turned the shower on and quickly got to work. It all became a blur of joy at that point. I am not entirely sure when she died, but I am sure it was long before I was done. 

My memory comes back to me holding her heart in my hand. I smiled a wide - - and may I say evil - - smile. I crushed it like a red water balloon. Beautiful red blood ran from it. It mixed with the water and went down the drain. Oh, and as a bonus, I shoved her heart into her mouth!” He laughed at this like a child who had seen his teacher sit on the thumbtack he had carefully put in the chair while the teacher was not looking.

I shuddered at this. “What happened next?” I asked him. 

“I then walked up to the mirror and gave you control again,” the me in the mirror responded. “I assumed you know what has happened since then.”

All I was able to say was, “Yes.” I was scared to look in the tub. I did not want to my wife’s blond hair covered in crimson blood. I did not wanted to see her grey eyes in shock. That is, if her eyes were still in her sockets. I would have put it past me - - the evil me - - to have spooned them out. I did not know what to do anymore, so I came to a decision. 

“Fix this,” I said. He grinned and took control of my body. I did not desire to watch what he was going to do, so I let myself sleep while he handled the dirty work. 

I woke up the next morning in my bed. There was a standing mirror pulled up next to me. In it, he stood there watching me. “Sleep well?” he said as he grinned his evil grin.

I ignored the question and asked, “Is it taken care of?”

“The body has been buried AND I managed to frame someone for it,” he responded.

“Who?” I asked.

“The neighbors,” he said. “Now, listen up. Your story is that you and your wife got in an argument, so you took a walk. When you came back, she was gone. At some point today, you need to call as many of her friends and family members as possible to ask if she is staying with them. Once you’ve done that, report her as missing to the police. Then, leave everything else as is. Don’t try to do anything else. If you do, you might screw it all up.”

“So are you going to tell me anything else about your master plan?” I asked once he was done. 

“No,” he responded. “I don’t want to risk you accidentally spilling the tea to someone.” 

I thought this reasonable, so I dropped the subject. I got some clothes on and went downstairs and into the kitchen. I fixed myself a cup of coffee, but as I did so, I noticed something was missing. The security camera I had set up in the living room was gone. So he got rid of the cameras, I thought to myself. 

I walked outside onto my porch and noticed yet another detail. Someone had shot the security camera out there! This did not make sense to me, but I did not question it. I did not want to “screw it all up.”

After I finished my coffee, I did as the me in the mirror instructed. I called as many family members and friends as possible. To each of them I said, “Mary and I got into a fight last night, and she isn’t at home. Is she staying with you?” Every single one of them answered, “No.”

Once this was done, I called the police. They came to my house and began investigating. To my surprise they found nothing in the bathroom. In fact, they found nothing in my house at all. 

A few weeks later, they got a search warrant for my neighbor’s house. They found traces of Mary’s blood and even bloody strands of her hair. It was not long before they found her body in the woods behind their house. I once again was in fear of discovery, but I never was. It was not my fingerprints they found, but those of my neighbor, Richard Foster. He was sentence to twenty years in prison.

After the case was closed, me and my other self had a “staff meeting” of sorts. “Well, that was easier than expected,” I said as a sipped a glass of red wine.

“And you couldn’t have done it without me,” the other me responded. He was not granted the luxury of wine, for he was in the standing mirror. 

“I suppose,” I said as I finished my glass. “Now we can go back to the way things used to be.” I was pouring more wine into my glass.

“And what makes you think I would let you?” he said. He was no longer grinning. “If it weren’t for me, you would be locked away in a cell right now. You owe me.”

As much as I hated to admit it, I knew he was right. I was in his debt. “So what do you want from me?” I asked.

He was grinning again. He truly was evil, and I knew he knew it. In fact, I believe he liked being evil. That thought scared me for what he was going to demand. “I want you to keep getting married,” he said, “so that I can kill more people. I desire to kill and watch blood like a river. I want to feel the same joy I felt when I killed your wife.”

After another glass of wine to help me think, I agreed. I did not like to kill, but I had found it fun to evade the police. “It looks like we have a life of excitement ahead of us,” I said to him. I felt his infectiously evil grin make its way along my face.

“Oh yes!” he responded. “We’re going to have ourselves a good old time.” 

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, and I did drink to that. That drink was the beginning of the me in the mirror and I beginning our lovely life of bloodshed.